How old is your toddler? By the age of four, most toddlers are smart enough to realize that they are dealing with an adult who is an idiot. If the toddler is two or three, there is a slight chance of "catching the Stupid", but it is unlikely to damage the child permanently, provided there are a few better role models around. Living with idiots is a very important life skill which humans and some social animals acquire naturally.

And the role model doesn't have to be anything spectacular. Many toddlers have been rescued from the Stupid by a dog or cat, who act as a corrective to the idiocy of the Mother or Father figures.

About half of human intelligence is innate and half is environmentally determined. A child in an enriched environment can be extraordinarily precocious, precious, and annoying, but even in a deprived environment, where all the adults and children are idiots born and bred, an intelligent child can survive thanks to imaginary friends, demonic possession, or exposure to positive influences from television or books left on park benches by those annoying people who leave books in public places for other people to find and read. And, of course, the family dog may well be able to act as Nanny to the child.

Children were designed by Nature to thrive even if raised by parents with barely the intellectual capacity of apes. Parents have not evolved as quickly as children any way, because they are not affected by neoteny (except for Geek and Nerd Parents), so all children are, as a rule, more open and thoughtful than their care-givers. This explains how the population makes it through grade school teachers and kindergarten twits without serious degeneration of their mental capacity.

In worse cases scenarios, a gay uncle or aunt will take the child under their fairy wings and teach them the concepts of irony, kitsch, camp, and self-depreciating humour. In other words, will teach them that all of the adults that they know are morons. That's why God made gays--to correct the errors of heredity and evolution. Homosexuals are one of the rare creatures of God to pass their genes on two-steps forward and one step to the left or right, like the Knight's move in chess. Gayness is inherited from your uncles and aunts in much the same way that the Queen Bee's children are actually her sisters or something. Who knows from Queen Bees? Look it up in Wikipedia.

My mother is a fundie teabagger type. My sister & I both have 10 year old sons.

My sister's kid is at grandma's house almost everyday. Grandma has taught the boy that the world is 6,000 years old and that dinosaurs are the work of the devil. She has also taught him that black/brown people are scary and bad. The kid goes to a really good school and is otherwise a smart kid. Unfortunately, he believes everything his grandma says is true.

We live in a different state and limit visits with her to once a year at most. I don't want my mom's particular brand of crazy to influence my kid in any way. Hell, most of my family are drug addicts, child molesters, and/or violent. You don't get to be around my kid just because we're related.

My mother in law is a self-indulgent, narrow minded, occasionally delusional harpy who hates people for no good reason, but likes to vent her spleen at foreigners and the poor, typically without a reasoned argument. She always frames her world in how things affect her first,every one else last. When we told her we were having kids, her Weeners was, 'Well *I* can't help you!". Not that we asked, but was a 'hooray' to much to be asked for?A lot of this comes from being a burnt-out ER nurse who saw WAY too much of the underside of humanity for 35 years. She divorced my father in law years ago, hates men in general, and likes to pass judgement on everything everybody else does. My brother in law is in therapy, and it's taken my wife years to learn to argue without feeling like she's not allowed, or that it's all her fault. My m-i-l isn't actually stupid, but there's a level of intellectual laziness she demonstrates, a deliberate effort to ever think past the end of her own nose, that both frustrating and scary.

Now we've got twins on the way, and I swear to god,if she uses any of her vicious, insulting, you'll-never-succeed-unless-you-do-as-I-say rhetoric, she'll never see them again.

The guy who wrote the letter may be a jerk who can't articulate the problem well, but he may have a real concern.

acad1228:Is it really possible to dye one's hair blonde? I was under the impression that you could only bleach it to a certain degree to attain a particular shade of blonde. Of course, I could be wrong.

Often times you bleach it to a a very light color, then dye that to the shade of blond you want.